An exploration of pizza in and around Rochester, NY, one pizzeria at a time

Monday, October 19, 2009

Sully's Family Pizzeria, Webster

Sully’s Family Pizzeria is located in a convenience store at the corner of Plank Road and Empire Blvd. in Webster. Ordinarily I would not bother with reviewing convenience store pizza, since I assume a lot of it is not made from scratch on the premises, but this place advertises itself as a pizzeria, and as a matter of fact someone behind the counter was busy stretching out some dough when I went in.(Before I get to the pizza, I should mention that this place has no connection to Sully’s Pub in Rochester, which also makes pizza, and which I have not tried yet, though I intend to at some point.)OK - the pizza. There was a pretty good selection to choose from at lunchtime. The sweet/hot pepper combo caught my eye, and so I went with that. My slices were thick and heavy, and the crust was very soft. The underside was lightly browned and bore screen markings.The crust was topped by a light layer of sauce, which had a slightly sweet, tomatoey flavor, with some herbs in the background. The cheese was more thickly applied, and though it was browned a bit here and there, it tended to separate back into its component shreds as I bit into it.As a convenience store, Sully’s is pretty good. I didn’t check the gas prices, but they do have free air (which is as it should be - I know it costs money to buy and maintain an air pump, but gas stations shouldn’t charge for air, dammit), they serve Green Mountain coffee, and there’s even a liquor store attached, in case you’d like to pick up a nice bottle of Chianti to take home with your pizza (which the Italians apparently would never do, by the way).As a pizzeria, however, Sully’s didn’t wow me on this visit. No glaring problems here, and the flavor was good enough, but the crust was just really too, too soft. In theory, pizza that’s cooked in a professional pizza oven should have a better, crisper, toastier crust than the same pizza cooked in your home oven, because the typical home oven just can’t get as hot as a full-size pizza oven. But I’ve made pizza at home that came out a lot crisper than this. Maybe they need to crank their oven up a little more, or give it more time to heat up, or just bake the pizza longer, but a pizza crust should be, well, crusty, and this one wasn’t.Seems like I’ve been kind of stuck in the “C” range lately, but maybe it’s just the bell curve emerging. For pizza that wasn’t all that bad, but certainly could’ve been better, Sully’s ends up in the middle, and it gets a C from me.Sully’s Family Pizzeria, 480 Plank Rd. (at Empire Blvd.), Webster 787-1111(Pizzeria hours unknown at this point.)

Ratings Guide

A: great; one of the best this area has to offerB: pretty good; not top-notch, but definitely good, and better than averageC: OK; nothing special, but it’ll do; typical for our areaD: edible; if you’ve already paid for it, you might as well eat itF: downright bad; toss it and get something else